What you are describing is essentially government price controls, since that’s the only allegory to a consumer collective that can realistic achieve an absolute refusal of price hikes.
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Apple Reportedly Refuses to Accept TSMC Chip Price Hike
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What you are describing is essentially government price controls, since that’s the only allegory to a consumer collective that can realistic achieve an absolute refusal of price hikes.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
No I'm describing consumers wising up as a group and deciding to flex their greater power vs. sellers- the power to NOT BUY at any price. Until the last generation or two, consumers were generally great at maximizing the value of the dollar.
If you have any living grandparent or pre-baby-boomer relatives, ask them how much things cost when they were your age. Then ask yourself WHY whole cars could be purchased for a few thousand dollars and whole homes could be purchased for only a few tens of thousands in those "good old days."
The last two generations seem to have set aside that power. Part of that is the emergence of credit to make it possible to "buy now" vs. having to "save up for" things. Part of that was 2-income households creating more spare cash to then be siphoned away from being "spare or bonus" to being almost "required" to stay afloat, etc.
Consumers can reclaim that power by simply deciding at any time that their hard-earned money is worth more than the ever-higher prices being demanded for non-essential stuff. Until many of them do that, pricing will only continue to rise because that's easy revenue and easy "record" profit.
That's not saying we get back to $3K cars and $30K homes. Underlying components DO cost more than they cost back then. Incomes to make things is higher than they were back then. Etc. BUT, the power of "NO" en masse would be the fastest way to cool the automatic price hikes that seem to be becoming "normal" year over year.
Consumers don't need the GOV to do it, nor would the GOV be interested in doing it. The answer to this problem is not looking for anyone else to do something about it. Consumers need to do it themselves... or just keep rolling over and paying more and more and more.
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We should remember that Apple effectively froze the price of their main product in the US this year, despite market turmoil and instability around the world. Yes prices rose outside the US, but largely due to dollar strength. Apple is only able to freeze prices by driving a hard bargain with suppliers by leveraging volumes of orders.
If China invades Taiwan there isn't going to be a TSMC/factories. Taiwan isn't going to just let China come in at take it for free. If they factories don't get destroyed in the fighting (This is most likely scenario - see Ukraine) then there's simply no way the Taiwanese government and military will leave their crown jewel in place for China to benefit.
Easier said than done. Nm mind that some of us here are Apple fanatics (and TBH, I have some vices of my own), but Apple has become very adept at marketing, and using their influence to get their way. "Time to pull up your big boy pants" is one such expression they've used against those they've worked with.
That said, somebody out there pointed out how amusing it is when we go on travel, a woman is selling a hand-made hat for $60 that's crushable and supports the local economy, but we'll try to haggle the price off that anyways. But then we go into an Apple store and just happily fork over $10K+ for MacOS hardware and accessories, or $1K for that new iPhone or iPad.
$400 a month?!?
With some very rough math… if gas was $5/gal, that’d be 80 gallons of gas. On average there’s roughly 22 weekdays in a month. That’s roughly 3.6 gallons of gas a day. I could drive about 140 miles on that much gas. That’s a 70 mile commute, or, what, driving a giant pickup truck?
I'm sure the context was for "wants", not "needs". Now, if you really need Apple stuff, then fair enough. I wouldn't begrudge someone who could honestly get by with Windows and Android but got MacOS and iOS anyways. My phone doubles up as a gaming device, in addition to having some work related utilities. A decade or 2 back, I can justify getting an iPod Classic since it eased my commutes.
People do refuse to pay higher prices for apple products. It is one of the reasons its market share isn’t two or three times what it is. And for specific products, price too high and they fail, eg the Mac cube, the homepod, Airpods max.
Demand follows a curve, practically an inverse of a supplier’s supply curve.
Why do you think a 70 mile commute is unusual? Not common, but certainly not unusual. I am amazed what people are prepared to do to follow their dream. But at least in my country, particularly regional areas, that would not even raise an eyebrow. Even near our largest city, people would travel that distance, although most would do it by train, but heaps would also commute in a car. There are some regional kids that would travel that distance every day to go to school.
Not all of us are inner city hipsters.
Actually yes, we do live in a rural area far out from his office, and he does drive a truck, which he has to for work. Of course we could live closer, and pay double the cost for our housing/property.
Well, even though I don’t really owe anyone on a message board an explanation for my life choices, we DO live in a more rural area with property, which probably cost us half of what it would’ve if we lived closer to his office.
My husband has to drive a truck due to the type of work he does, although it gets decent mileage for a truck.
We bought our 5 bedroom house on 5 acres for $95,000. Of course it needed some work, which we did, but that house would’ve cost us, at the time, at least $250-300K in town, and likely without any acreage. It’s now worth over half a million, but we couldn’t touch anything like it for that price closer to his office.
In addition, he owns his company, so technically we don’t pay for the gas OR the truck, but a lot of the men that work for him travel in from pretty good distances, and spend a lot on gas. $400/month is definitely not unheard of.
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Name me a company that has TSMC technology of making 4-5nm die?
Ya bash Samsung all the time, why even bothering going to them? BTW, stop going to them for screens, memory, and other parts. Tell Apple to build their own plants, create their own technology instead.
TSMC has Apple over a barrel. Maybe Apple should have spent some of their billions on their own fab production?
Apple tried Samsung with the A9 on the iPhone 6s, and the result was not favorable. Samsung fabbed A9 were reportedly less efficient. This extends to Qualcomm as well, as their Samsung fabbed SoCs are suffering bad efficiencies as well. Samsung fab is just not doing a good job. Even Qualcomm had to go wih TSMC.
Like it has been suggested by others in this thread, this is not possible for many reasons. This is far more complicated that just writing a cheque.
TSMC had/has exclusivity/capacity from ASML. Apple cannot buy TSMC or ASML for anti-trust reasons. There are simply players in the supply chain that have such a big lead that it is unlikely that others catch up soon.
Should Intel be able to capitalize on the latest gear from ASML, they can once again get some/more of Apple's business.
Plays like this take years/decades to pull off and tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.
They didn't increase iPhone prices right ?
Business has just one goal, how to make more money.
Once Intel builds fabs in US probably Apple will work with Intel to make SOC for Apple.
that's the best option available.
There will always be negotiations between companies on price, almost every week i think, nothing new.
Every one wants to reduce costs and maximize profits.
Why not?
My iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020 Intel Core 19) is a really really fine machine.
By far the best computer Apple has ever built.....in my opinion having used most of the desk-tops Apple has produced.
That's one way to control inflation. For the average peon, refusing to accept a price increase doesn't mean jack squat to the seller. There are plenty more average peons who will suck it up. But when one of the world's largest companies says nope, you have to at least consider that they're probably holding enough cards to make it happen. A small or medium manufacturer doesn't get that kind of leverage.
The real challenge is going to be having enough small and medium companies a) refuse to accept higher prices from suppliers, b) refuse to accept higher prices for overhead expenses *cough*health insurance*cough* and c) refuse to cave to labor demanding ludicrously high wage increases for doing the same job they've been doing or in many cases less than they were doing. When that happens, assuming that governments get their heads out of there asses on energy, that's when inflation stops.
The real challenge is going to be having enough small and medium companies a) refuse to accept higher prices from suppliers, b) refuse to accept higher prices for overhead expenses *cough*health insurance*cough* and c) refuse to cave to labor demanding ludicrously high wage increases for doing the same job they've been doing or in many cases less than they were doing. When that happens, assuming that governments get their heads out of there asses on energy, that's when inflation stops.
That's absolutely correct. Not sure why there are so many thumbs-down on this comment. It's absolutely correct that consumers can decide to spend less.
We are being bombarded by ads from a local general Union that says "Our workers need higher wages because of inflation". But higher wages do not solve the issue! Bringing spending -down- to combat inflation is the only solution, and that's exactly why governments increase interest rates... to cool spending. Higher wages are not the solution.
Apple, though, does not have as much control to just lower spending. They must manufacturer sufficient supply to meet demand, so controlling costs in other ways becomes critical, such as per-unit, per-chip pricing. They still need to make X number of chips, at whatever cost. Very different from consumer managing their own spending, often of which is for comfort and luxury, not basic needs.